untethered

Talking Comanches, God and women.

 Indian killer George “Comanche Bill” Porter interviewed by the Davenport Gazette in 1871:

There has been stopping in this city for a couple of days past one of those characters who have made for themselves a celebrant for their bravery and daring on the plains of the far West, among the Indians and the buffalo, in recounting whose deeds and hair-breadth escapes and peculiar lite the pages of romance are filled. The person to whom we refer is no less a character than “Comanche Bill,” who is reputed to be the slayer of no less than 183 Indians.

He has been nine years on the plains, part of which time he has been in the employ of the Government as scout. He has hunted and killed Indians for the pleasure and sweets of revenge, and hunted and trapped of necessity. He us now on his return to his old life in the West, having been on a visit to his early home in Minnesota. He is about 28 years of age, of slender build, sandy complexioned, with a profusion of hair that he wears long on the neck. His dress is a pair of buckskin pants, ornamented from the outer seaius with a row of steel buttons, a coarse shirt, an old coat and a broad-brimmed hat. His eye is piercing keen, and he has a grip like a dozen blacksmiths. In response to our questions he said : 

“My name is George W. Porter. I have been on the plains since ’62. I was in the Minnesota massacre, near New Ulm, the 18th of August of that year. All my folks were killed except me and my little sister three years old, whom they took prisoner.” 

” Where were yon?”
“I was away at the military station on business; went the day before. ” The first I knew of the massacre, I was coming along the road on my way home, when I saw a little way ahead of me a wagon filled with women and children, that the settlers had sent to the station for protection. Just then I saw the Indians pounce upon them, and I dodged into the woods. I could hear the hatchets crushing into their heads. They killed ’em all, every one.” 

” What did you do ? “
“They scalped ’em, and when the coast was clear, I got out and pretty soon along came a company of cavalry, and we buried them.” 

“Why didn’t you follow after the Indians?”
“I had no horse, and the captain didn’t want his men to go. You see that was in ’62, and everything was topsy-turvy.” 

” Did yon visit the scene of the massacre at New Ulm?”
“Yes. I went there the next day, and saw my father and mother all scalped and cut up, and my sister was gone. I swore by the eternal God that I would never rest until I had had revenge — a bloody revenge.”  

“Did you get any traces of your sister?”
“Why, yes; they was the Yankton, Swanee and Sioux Indians, and I knowed them pretty well. I learned that they had her. I knowed what they’d do with her.”  

“‘You have not been successful in your efforts to secure her?”
“No; you see, single-handed and alone, a man don’t stand much chance. That’s what I had been doing all the time. Once, in Arizona, I was right in sight of her. The way I knowed it was her was, I had been on the trail of the band of Sioux that had her a long time, and she was the only white person they had. This was in ’65, and then she looked just like mother. I waited, and watched, and picked an Indian off every little while, when he’d get a mile or two from camp, but ’twas no use. They kept too close watch over her.”  

“Were you ever captured?”
“Yes. The Blackfeets captured me and Jim Braden in ’64, when we were out hunting. They came on us with a rush, but they didn’t get us, though, until I had killed one young buck.” 

“What did they do with you you?”
“They marched about twenty-five miles to their camp, and there they stripped us of everything we had, and tied us up to a stake and let the women pound us with clubs. They did this every day tor eight days. We were tied with buckskin thongs, and one night it ruined and we slipped out of ’em when they got wet. Jim got away all right, but just as I ‘was gettin’ my things on, an old squaw woke up and gave the alarm. There was but four Indians in camp. The rest had gone on a hunt. I run, with only my knife. They came up to me, and I had a desperate fight. One shot hit me in the left arm (exhibiting scar. I cut and slashed the buck that got hold of me, and finally give him one under the ribs, so he wont tie any more thongs. And he cut me, too, here, and here, and here (showing the scars on his arm, neck and breast). The other buck never came near, for I’d got this buck’s gun afore he’d reached us.”

For a minute there I thought Porter must have been the inspiration for a favorite film of mine as a child, Jeremiah Johnson, but no, that story is about a man of that name who’s claimed to have killed hundreds of Crow Indians to avenge their killing his wife–a squaw.

Guest Jennifer Scharf has a theory proving the existence of God through quantum physics. Claire Khaw passed along this communication she received:

“Hello Jennifer Scharf and Claire Khaw. I ran across your online dialogues a week ago, and despite having studied many extremes of human thought over the years, I found the two of you, both individually and together, to be a unique and arresting phenomenon: two women, alt-right-adjacent but with imperious and idiosyncratic intellectual agendas, fighting it out in an almost unnoticed corner of philosophy Youtube.

I’ve tuned into two or three streams by now, I made a few comments in the chat, but I wanted to get in touch in a more formal way. As well as hello, this email is a step towards goodbye, because I do need to return to my own intellectual universe. But I felt that it is more civilized to send a personal communication, rather than just slip away as an anon.

I feel that my most substantial remarks are for Jennifer. I hesitate to make them, since they are a criticism of her physics, which to a great extent seems to be the jewel in the crown of her intellectual pride, and it might be a net loss if she were to suspend her philosophical barnstorming, because of doubts about her personal theory of everything. Nonetheless…

I read “Quantum Chemistry Teaser” in an attempt to see what your point is, regarding the periodic table. What I see is that you have a kind of combinatorial scheme, which serves to generate a number of types of “atom”, matching the the number of elements in the periodic table.

However, the variety of atoms in the world already has an explanation, in terms of possible electron wavefunctions, indexed by four quantum numbers; and there are specific reasons why those numbers can take the values that they do. I simply don’t believe that your explanation is remotely compatible with that other explanation; and that other explanation is part of a larger framework which can, for example, explain the emission spectra of atoms, in terms of energy differences between orbitals.

What I believe you have done, is attempt to prematurely forge a connection between physics and metaphysics. Such a connection provides a qualitative and intuitive interpretation of physics that is missing from any purely calculational framework. But you’re doing this in a way which negates large and verified parts of the calculational framework. Never mind skepticism about the standard model; despite your use of quantum notation, what you’re doing appears to be something already inconsistent with the kind of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics that describes orbitals.

I never yet heard of someone who made a seriously deviant personal theory of physics, and then abandoned it for orthodoxy. At least, I can’t think of any such person. I suppose one reason for it is the mathematical difficulty of advanced physics. If you really want to know the truth, but for whatever reason aren’t willing to spend however long it takes to learn gauge field theory and similar formalisms, it must be tempting to just keep finetuning your own creation.

So, as a bridge between your efforts and the kind of physics that any actual university lab utilizes in order to understand Bose condensation and a hundred other phenomena, I would like to point out the work of Michael Atiyah on “complex geometry of nuclei and atoms” and “geometric models of helium”. Atiyah was a very eminent mathematician who died earlier this year, and who in his final years, very sensibly decided to go for it, and began to speculate much more than in his previous works. Although physics contains a number of examples of surprising alternative descriptions of the same thing, I think it is very unlikely that this work of his actually connects to reality; but perhaps it will be stimulating for you to investigate.

And as for Claire… I regret that I have much less to say to you. As your interests are political and practical, they don’t face the same kind of critique as a new theory of nature, and frankly my political thinking is not as evolved as my scientific thinking. I guess all I will say is that I think I understand your motives, and that secular Quranism is an ingenious attempt to use the material provided by humanity’s historic civilizations and the current western situation, to restore patriarchy; but it probably has the most chance of being successful, in the places that need it the least.

One more thing, for you both. Are you aware of vixra.org? This is the free-for-all twin of arxiv.org, a site where academic physicists, computer scientists, and biologists post preprints of their papers. vixra was started by physicists who were being excluded from arxiv, but has since expanded to accommodate papers on all kinds of subject matter. Essentially anything can be posted, so long as it is not a work of libel or plagiarism. If either of you wishes to codify part of your thought in the form of a PDF, it could be another medium to use. 

Best wishes to you both, Mitchell Porter”

I don’t know how true this is

So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book’s description of these events, there was one constant: 

All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

The “last Comanche chief” Quanah Parker was born to a white mother, who was
unhappily repatriated

Parker was adopted [kidnapped–Wikipedia!] by the Comanche and lived with them for 24 years, completely forgetting her white ways. She married a Comanche chieftain, Peta Nocona, and had three children with him, including the last free Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. 

At approximately age 34, Parker was discovered and forcibly relocated by the Texas Rangers, but spent the remaining 10 years of her life refusing to adjust to life in white society. At least once, she escaped and tried to return to her Comanche family and children, but was again brought back to Texas. She found it difficult to understand her iconic status to the nation, which saw her as having been redeemed from the Comanches. Heartbroken over the loss of her family, she stopped eating and died of influenza in 1871.

As for Quanah Parker he seems to have thrived, even after finally surrendering to the US government and moving on to the reservation.

Herman Lehman was kidnapped by Apaches as a boy but ended up a Comanche

A few months after Lehman’s capture, the Apaches lied and told Lehmann they had killed his entire family, depriving him of any incentive to attempt escape. The Apaches took Herman Lehmann to their village in eastern New Mexico. He was adopted by a man named Carnoviste and his wife, Laughing Eyes. A year after his capture, General William T. Sherman passed through Loyal Valley on an inspection tour. Augusta Lehmann Buchmeier was granted a private audience with Sherman to plead for his assistance in finding her son. 

The Apaches called Lehmann “En Da” (White Boy). He spent about six years with them and became assimilated into their culture, rising to the position of petty chief. As a young warrior, one of his most memorable battles was a running fight with the Texas Rangers on August 24, 1875, which took place near Fort Concho, about 65 miles west of the site of San Angelo, Texas. Ranger James Gillett nearly shot Lehmann before he realized he was a white captive. When the Rangers tried to find Lehmann later, he escaped by crawling through the grass… 

Around the spring of 1876, Herman Lehmann killed an Apache medicine man avenging his killing of Carnoviste, his chief and master. Fearing revenge, he fled from the Apaches and spent a year alone in hiding. He became lonely and decided to search for a Comanche tribe that he might join. He observed a tribe all day long then entered the camp just after dark. At first they were going to kill him, however, a young warrior approached him that spoke the Apache tongue. Lehmann then explained his situation—that he was born white adopted by the Indians and that he left the Apaches after killing the medicine man. Another brave came forward verifying his story and he was welcomed to stay. He joined the Comanches who gave him a new name, Montechema (meaning unknown). 

Lehman fought the Texas Rangers until he was brought on to the reservation by Quanah Parker after holding out longer. He never fully adjusted to civilization, eventually returning to his Apache friends, after spending some time as a celebrity

 Throughout his life, Herman Lehmann drifted between two very different cultures. Lehmann was a very popular figure in southwestern Oklahoma and the Texas Hill Country, appearing at county fairs and rodeos. To thrill audiences, such as he did in 1925 at the Old Settlers Reunion in Mason County, he would chase a calf around an arena, kill it with arrows, jump off his horse, cut out the calf’s liver, and eat it raw.

That the nomadic life might be preferable to the modern, all else being equal, is certainly believable.

And the phenomenon of whites preferring the Indian lifestyle wasn’t just limited to the Comanches of the 19th century. A paper by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (I wonder if they’re related to Steve) notes that: “By the close of the colonial period, very few if any Indians had been transformed into civilized Englishmen. Most of the Indians who were educated by the English – some contemporaries thought all of them – returned to Indian society at the first opportunity to resume their Indian identities. Ont he other hand, large numbers of Englishmen had chosen to become Indians – by running away from colonial society to join Indian society, by not trying to escape after being captured, or by electing to remain with their Indian captors when treaties of peace periodically afforded them the opportunity to return home.” 

It then goes on to quote no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, who had independently noticed the same phenomenon: 

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while with them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

History must be full of instances of nomads coming up against settler cultures, but few must have been across such a chasm of difference as that between nomadic Indians and modern westerners. It must have been like stepping into a time machine for both sides. And of course the nomads were the chads

Whites who met Comanches would almost universally rave about how imposing and noble and healthy and self-collected and alive they seemed; there aren’t too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.

Like Nietzsche, the Comanche saw modern Christians as “botched” people. But then the Germans romanticized American Indians, so he may very well have known of and been influenced by the phenomenon mentioned above.

Do we pay for modern life with the vitality we saw in those Comanches?

“Spare the white man, kill the nigger!”
–Confederate troops at the Battle of the Crater

Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx … shared Captain Ahab’s mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, “What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.” It wasn’t that it was morally wrong … It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.
—Bonfire of the Vanities

“Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit…”
–Elmer Fudd*

Seeing a quote in a New York Times article from a prosecutor opposed to California’s moratorium on capital punishment–

“Of the 24 or so who are presently eligible for execution, half of them are white men,” she said. “So let’s execute them.”

–I assumed I’d find a minority voice behind it. Off I went to get, as the song says, my fair share of abuse. Alas, the prosecutor is a white girl. A Becky; as such contending with Straight White Male for object of greatest abuse by the burgeoning new order.

Some reward that for years of betrayal of white men. Heartbreaking the reaction of white women in public life to the “Becky” campaign seeking their relegation to second-class status: doubling down on their condemnation of straight white men.

Prosecutors naturally fall to the right on the issue of crime, despite the Soros-funded efforts of recent years to elect progressive district attorneys and lower black incarceration rates yielding such as Kim Foxx and Dallas’ lawfighter DA.

As more of these emerge, it will be interesting to see if they find their own law-and-order conservatism in cases involving whites. They’ve already all but announced their bias in that regard–coming in with the declared mandate to “lower incarceration rates”. Relaxing laws is the first, most obvious means. It allows a minority of white criminals to ride the “reform” out of jail (perhaps–I suspect bureaucratic discretion in reducing sentences is biased against them) despite the reform being intended entirely for the benefit of their black fellow convicts.

But such measures will produce more crime and quickly realize diminishing returns in equalizing incarceration rates before they come up against reality. Something more will have to be done.

I think the experience of school discipline “reform” suggests what that will be. Reportedly one means of equalizing student suspensions between aggressive blacks and placid whites–without the literal blood sacrifice of murdered teachers that would come from complete capitulation–is to stringently enforce even the smallest rules in the case of non-black students, thus “equalizing” the numbers. One white kid suspended for cracking wise equals one black kid suspended for trying to choke the same white boy out, at the level of that statistic.

Progressive prosecutors for whom equality in incarceration is a noble goal are probably already doing this. And they are virtually unopposed. The Megaphone remains on message regarding criminal reform, blaring out all dissent and seducing the callow Trump and leading to his ill-advised First Step Act.

In our perverse order whites have long been their own persecutors–and executioners, enthusing over and acquiescing to their own demise. The spectacle of the California prosecutor’s woke enthusiasm only makes this explicit and direct. We are now literally killing ourselves off to appease them.

Think it’ll work?

*

I asked my favorite violent man James LaFond a question:

Do you know of any histories or studies of various defeated peoples?

I was thinking of this http://dennisdale.blogspot.com/2019/05/after-fall.html

First, I disagree with Sailer on one thing, the fall of the Soviet Union was not a defeat for the Russian People but one of the three triumphant comebacks of a people who have suffered more than most.

Dennis, thanks for this great question and the link to your thoughtful article.

Before I start naming resurrected peoples off the top of my head, let’s keep in mind that many of the fiercest folk in human history became conquerors because of the fact that they got their asses kicked and then moved on until they found asses soft enough for them to kick.

Below is a brief litany of nine racial rises from the verge of ethno-cultural [1] extinction:

-The Proto-Greek tribes who became the five major ethnicities we know as the Greeks, including the Attic Athenians and the Dorian Spartans, got their asses handed to them by someone in the interior of southern Russia and moved down into the Aegean Basin to spawn conquerors for 2,000 years and even now remain as diner operators around the world and the canary in the coal mine of European economics.

-The Trojan survivors of the Greek sack of their city are said to have migrated to Italy, where they became the Romans, and thence the Italians, a people who after many defeats are among the few national populations in fading Europe to contest their ethnic replacement.

-Most of the nations of Modern Western Europe were founded by the aristocracy of ancient Germanic tribes, such as Franks, Goths, Angels and Saxons who were defeated and driven like chaff on the wind by Asiatic nomads such as the Huns, only to kick in the doors of the rotting House of Rome and set up almost 2,000 years of ethnic freedom. Who knows if they or their waste people expelled to colonize America and Australia might rise again from the ashes of the current ethno-cultural suicide attempt?

-The Mongols were beaten to the verge of extinction with barely a few women and boys to carry on and rose to rule the greatest land empire in history and yet retain a sovereign nation.

-The Aztecs were defeated by some unknown tribe in what is now the southern U.S., migrated to Mexico, were enslaved by the Toltecs, rose up and overthrew them, then got nearly wiped out and colonized by the Spanish, and now, are taking over the U.S. drug, food, landscaping and construction business and reoccupying the territory that they were driven from by [my guess is Apaches] almost a thousand years ago.

-The Crow people, Sacred Ravens, were driven from their homeland around the Great Lakes in the early modern period, perhaps the early 1700s and eventually migrated to the Rocky Mountains, allied with the U.S., fucked over their ancestral enemies as the bloodhounds of the Great Satan, and yet remain in their second home, albeit as a client people. Who knows if they will emerge distinct when the U.S. collapses?

-The Japanese were humiliated by the filthy, jabbering Gajin and forced to join the modern world, then took revenge on it by rising to be the fourth greatest military power in the world, surpassing Great Britain by every measure, maiming Imperial Russia and Nationalistic China, only to be done dirtier than any warring nation as the only people to be nuked. And where are they now? The Japs have one of the only sovereign cultures on the planet and I predict them to be the last remaining nation when the Ice Age sweeps civilization before it.

-The Russians were crushed by the Mongols, toiled under the Yoke for hundreds of years before turning on their masters and conquering half of Asia, were then nearly murdered by the Germans in WWI, decapitated in their collective hospital bed by the Soviets and have now remerged to be the third greatest power in the world.

-The Hebrews were the slaves of the Egyptians and got out of that, the slaves of the Babylonians, and got out of that, the slaves of the Romans and—oops, they only got out of that with 1 in 10 left, losing their home for the third time—only to become the bean counters for Christ and the pimps and slavers for the Prophet and eventually rising as the financiers, educators, doctors and narrative crafters of the post Christian world. The Jews stand as a testament to the fact that defeat is not the end—necessarily—but possibly the seedbed for a rebirth, literally confirming the biological fact that getting fucked sometimes bears wonderful fruit.

Notes
1. I refuse to consider race as a purely biological state. Without culture we are just meat.

NOTE: The video accompanying this post has been taken down due to intemperate remarks made by a guest. 

Katie was a teenage alt-righter:

In the spring of 2011, Katie McHugh was a student at Allegheny College. She grew up in western Pennsylvania and was attending the region’s oldest private college but wanted to make it to Washington and join the conservative movement. She was a quiet young woman who hadn’t ventured very far from where she’d grown up. Her reading had taken her to some unusual places, however, for a young person.

Katie ended up writing and editing for Breitbart in the heady days of Trump’s campaign, becoming  a producer for Steve Bannon’s Sirius radio show before being sacked for a relatively tame anti-Muslim tweet, after drawing attention for associating with antisemitic accounts.
She bounced out via Charles C. Johnson’s Got News and now works a regular working class job (shudder, says Buzzfeed). She’s tried recanting in a tell-all article she can’t get published; when she shopped it to the Atlantic they declined but offered her the role of snitch:

The friend with whom I’d previously interacted on Twitter reached out to show me an essay McHugh wrote about her experiences. I showed the piece to my editors at the Atlantic — where I was then a staff writer but soon to leave to work on a book — but we discussed it and agreed that our role was to approach her as a journalistic subject rather than publish a piece by her. McHugh attempted to get her essay published at the UK magazine the Spectator, but it never was. “We were interested in the story — and the curious cast of characters involved — unfortunately we just couldn’t quite make it work as a Spectator piece so we encouraged her to place it elsewhere,” Spectator editor Freddy Gray said in an email. (In their statement about this story, the Breitbart spokesperson said, “She is a disgruntled ex-employee and has been shopping this story around here and overseas for well over a year, and nobody with credibility would publish it.”)

Instead, McHugh began to act as a source for me, something she now wants people to know.

In addition to McHugh being offered as a cautionary tale, another Reefer Madness-like hype job, Buzzfeed claims to expose a white nationalist pipeline running from somewhere around Peter Brimelow’s evil lair (Katie was a close friend), through Breitbart and on to the White House.

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The race that could erect such buildings and gather such treasures as the Temple of the Sun possessed, and could conquer and rule a dominion of fifty days’ journey from north to south, must have been a strong and in its way gifted race. It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of those stolid and downtrodden Indians whom one sees to-day, peddling their rude wares in the marketplace of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is scarcely one among them above the rank of a labourer; and during the last three centuries few indeed have emerged from the abject condition to which the Conquest reduced them. 

The sudden fall of a whole race is an event so rare in history that one seeks for explanations. It may be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving only the peasants who had already been serfs under their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to believe that the tremendous catastrophe which befell them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, incomparably superior in energy and knowledge, completely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the self respect of the individuals who composed it. They were already a docile and submissive people, and now under a new tyranny, far harsher than that of rulers of their own blood, they sank into hopeless apathy, and ceased even to remember what their forefathers had been.

James Bryce, South America, Observations and Impressions, 1912

White nationalist historical triumphalism (aside from being a mouthful) does not account for the reality of Western dominance–achieved by an elite exploiting a people domesticated and tamed for the purpose. With that elite given over to degeneracy and post-racialism and hostile to the people, paeans to Western Civilization and the Faustian spirit mock us.

Western elite hostility is a remarkable thing. The wealthy and powerful will never forgive us for letting them exploit us through history, it seems–indeed, it’s the common man who’ll answer for colonialism and slavery, for his “exploitation” of the poor brown and black, whose rough ancestors are moving in next door, thanks to that magnanimous white elite.

The mild virtues the old elite cultivated and exploited–conformity, rule-following, faithfulness–now serve only to make the common white man more easily exploited by the new trans-national order. His mild evolved nature makes it harder for him to understand he is in fact being exploited. He trusts, still.

Steve Sailer points out a remarkable disparity in accountability:

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out a curious aspect of the rave review in the New York Times for the new smash hit play in the tradition of Hamilton as being beloved by deep-pocketed Wall Streeters: The Lehman Trilogy. Even though the first act is about the Jewish immigrant Lehman Brothers arriving in Alabama in the 1840s and starting their eponymous business buying and selling with cotton plantations, the NYT review doesn’t mention anything about … you know … slavery.

The Lehman brothers owned seven slaves, which sounds positively modest for a wealthy family in the Old South. Far more significantly, the brothers were investment bankers before leaving the South, and were no doubt quite useful to the slave economy which rewarded them so greatly.

Steve calls our attention to the gap:

It’s not like the Lehman Brothers were Kate Smith… Have some perspective, people! The Lehman Brothers just got rich off slavery. They didn’t go so far as to sing songs.

I confess I didn’t previously know of Kate Smith, the latest casualty of our ongoing cultural cleansing:

The NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers on Friday joined baseball’s New York Yankees in halting the playing of Kate Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America” at home games because of lyrics in other songs the late singer recorded. 

The Flyers also covered up a statue of Smith that has stood at Philadephia’s sports complex since 1987. 

“We have recently become aware that several songs performed by Kate Smith contain offensive lyrics that do not reflect our values as an organization,” the Flyers said in a statement. “As we continue to look into this serious matter, we are removing Kate Smith’s recording of ‘God Bless America’ from our library and covering up the statue that stands outside of our arena.”

But watching this video it’s hard not to fall in love with her:

Turns out “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” is actually a lament in the tradition of “Old Man River”, portraying blacks as shouldering the burdens of the white man’s world while–early example of that favored Trope of the Narrative–teaching him how to be joyous.

You have to wonder if it isn’t that “God Bless America” is simply too offensive for the diverse present, and the profiteers have found a pretext. It isn’t the imagined horror of the second video, but the unrestrained (by guilt or geld) patriotic joy and vigor of the first that they’re coming for, it’s that that chills them.

The real measure of privilege in this country is that astounding gap between what’s allowed Kate’s lineage and what’s allowed to the Lehmans and others.

With the Wikileaks model Julian Assange became an innovator in, depending on your point of view, investigative journalism or revolutionary anarchy. He then became the unfortunate subject of innovation–of the sort of censorship we’re now seeing applied to genuine political dissent.

Wikileaks was briefly the darling of the Bush-era media before going too far, apparently, with “Cablegate“, the publication of thousands of US Embassy communications, in 2010.

The deep state counter-assault has been effective in pressuring private enterprise to abandon Assange and his organization, and while it hasn’t been able to get Assange (though it’s still not clear US authorities should really want him and the trouble he might represent), it’s kept Wikileaks on its heels and support for Assange to a minimum.

From a working draft of a Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review paper I found useful:

Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?  

Denial of service attacks by an extralegal public-private partnership 

…Beginning a few hours after the release of the first embassy cables, the Wikileaks site  came under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A pattern of denial of service attacks continued over the next few weeks. It is difficult to pin down whether these attacks came from government.
…
On December 1 Senator Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, launched a different kind of denial of service attack. Lieberman released a statement in which he stated: “I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company – whether American or foreign – should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”

If we were to consider what judicial process would be required for the government to exert this kind of force directly—cutting off technical infrastructures and excluding an organization from the payment systems—because of the content of information that organization disseminated, the barriers in law would have been practically insurmountable. However, the implicit alliance, a public-private partnership between the firms that operate the infrastructure and the government that encourages them to help in its war on terror, embodied by this particularly irritating organization, was able to achieve extra-legally much more than law would have allowed the state to do by itself.

The campaign against Wikileaks was the sort of public-private partnership we see now being waged against purveyors of “Hate”, where censorship is effected by private enterprise through such as denial of hosting and pay services.
The companies are compliant where they aren’t taking the initiative, the corporate equivalent of Steve Sailer’s “voluntary auxiliary thought police”–with whom they are staffed.

Censorship is privatized, and made unaccountable.

Once the charge Assange had endangered lives was made plausible the signaling contest set in, its reaches defined, of course, by calls for execution, taken up by more than one politician. This parallels the present narrative assault on nationalism, with a theme trumpeted by allied media and taken up by enthusiastic, or desperate, individuals and organizations. One of their concerns, of course, is not to fall afoul of the whole process themselves.

The sociopolitical framing makes more comprehensible the vigilante responses in other subsystems of the information environment. Responding to a call from Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, several commercial organizations tried to shut down Wikileaks by denial of service of the basic systems under their respective control. Wikileaks’ domain name server provider, EveryDNS, stopped pointing at the domain “wikileaks.org,” trying to make it unreachable. 

Amazon, whose cloud computing platform was hosting Wikileaks data, cut off hosting services for the site, and Apple pulled a Wikileaks App from its App Store. Banks and payment companies, like Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America, as well as the Swiss postal bank, cut off payment service to Wikileaks in an effort to put pressure on the site’s ability to raise money from supporters around the world. These private company actions likely responded to concerns about being associated publicly with “undesirables.” There is no clear evidence that these acts were done at the direction of a government official with authority to coerce it. 

The sole acknowledged direct action was a public appeal for, and subsequent praise of, these actions by Senator Joe Liberman. In that regard, these acts represent a direct vulnerability in the private infrastructure system and a potential pathway of public censorship. It is impossible to ignore the role that a diffuse, even if uncoordinated set of acts by government officials, beginning with the phrasing of Harold Koh’s letter to Wikileaks from November 27th, cited by PayPal as its reason for closure, and through to various public statements and organizational actions, played in triggering the commercial services denial of service attack. 

In combination, the feedback from public to private action presents the risk of a government able to circumvent normal constitutional protections to crack down on critics who use the networked public sphere. This occurs through informal systems of pressure and approval on market actors who are not themselves subject to the constitutional constraints. This extralegal public-private partnership allows an administration to achieve through a multi-system attack on critics results that would have been practically impossible to achieve within the bounds of the constitution and the requirements of legality. 

Honk honk.